Enter Helen

1962

“As tasteless a book as I have read this year.”

—Robert Kirsch reviewing Sex and the Single Girl in the Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1962

On the morning of May 23, 1962, Bernard Geis Associates sent Helen Gurley Brown a Western Union telegram, featuring an illustrated bouquet of roses and this message:

HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BIRTH OF YOUR LITERARY BABY

WE PREDICT A LONG AND LUSTY LIFE

ESPECIALLY THE LATTER

Staying at the Hotel Madison on East Fifty-Eighth Street in New York, Helen was only a short walk away from Berney’s office, but the telegram was a nice welcome to New York—or, as he called it, Godless Gotham. Today was the day that Sex and the Single Girl would be hitting shelves in bookstores across the country. Helen’s book tour had begun with a stop in Chicago, where she went tête-à-tête with the beloved gossip columnist Irv “Kup” Kupcinet on his weekly television show, At Random. She was in New York for a luncheon with Joan Crawford at the Gaslight Club and various TV and radio interviews, including a spot on the Tonight Show. To celebrate the book’s release, Berney and his wife wanted to throw a small dinner party for Helen and David. (Among the suggested guests in addition to Letty: David’s old mentor Herb Mayes; the showbiz biographer Maurice Zolotow; the president of Bantam Books, Oscar Dystel; and their respective wives.) Unfortunately, David had had to cancel his trip east at the last minute—trouble was brewing at Fox over a multimillion-dollar adaptation of Cleopatra—but Letty had promised to meet Helen after another dinner for a late-night drink.

When the telegram arrived, it was before noon on Wednesday, and the city was at work. In offices throughout Midtown, everyone was still talking about the sultry birthday salute that Marilyn Monroe, sewn into a sheer, sparkly, flesh-colored gown, had given to President Kennedy four days earlier at Madison Square Garden. Outside Helen’s window, vendors sold their last copies of the New York Times to businessmen in crew cuts and cordovan shoes wanting to read up on the Yankees’ victory over the Angels, and what was happening in Vietnam. And in the boutiques along Fifth Avenue, salesmen fitted customers in seersucker suits as crisp as new banknotes, beckoning summer. Soon enough, people would be lining up in front of the Trans-Lux on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Second Street to see The Miracle Worker, starring Patty Duke as Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft as her teacher, but the theaters were not yet open. And across the city, booksellers were still putting Sex and the Single Girl on the shelves, in time for the lunch crowd.

The book itself was far from showy. In fact, it looked more like a secret handbook. There was no picture on the front. Just a simple teal-blue cover, with the word SEX in light blue and the i in Single swapped out for the number 1 in the same shade. The Unmarried Woman’s Guide to Men, Career, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men, it read at the bottom under the author’s name in all caps.

Long before it hit shelves, the distributors at Random House had insisted that the title be Sex and the Single Girl instead of Sex for the Single Girl, as was initially proposed—a subtle change that somehow seemed less crass. The jacket designers had been going for an equally understated, tasteful look that would titillate readers without going over the top and scaring them away. A single girl who was itching to get her hands on a copy of the book didn’t have to feel conspicuous leafing through the pages. She only had to grab it before another girl did. When it was rightly in her hands, she turned to the back cover to get a good look at the black-and-white photo of the author, Helen Gurley Brown. Wearing a tailored jacket, pearls, and her hair in a prim flip, she looked like countless other agency girls who were just now typing on their IBM Selectrics at countless firms lining Madison Avenue. Or maybe she looked more like their boss. She had an authoritative air with her crossed arms, arched brows, level gaze, and small, bemused smile. “I dare you to read this book,” she seemed to be saying to that girl.

Tens of thousands of girls accepted the dare.

By the time lunch rolled around, people were talking about Sex and the Single Girl. A week later, it was condensed in The American Weekly, reaching a nationwide audience and giving the book a flying start. It also landed on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, where on the latter it rose to No. 3, beating Six Crises by Richard M. Nixon. “How does it feel to be on top of Richard Nixon?” Letty quipped.

In millions of living rooms across America, Helen Gurley Brown was on TV talking about Sex and the Single Girl, though frequently the networks wouldn’t allow her to actually utter the title. Instead, she displayed the book for the camera.

In hundreds of interviews with the press, she held her own, answering questions as Letty had instructed her to do—her way.

Where did she draw the line? Was she really suggesting that a single girl should pursue self-fulfillment at any cost, even if it meant having an affair with a married man?

“Now I don’t have to go out and promote single women having affairs,” Helen told a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, at a cocktail party in the St. Francis Hotel. “They have them all the time. . . . Far from wrecking a girl’s life, it may make her a more interesting, womanly, compassionate human being.”

But wasn’t it ever terribly lonely being a single girl?

“Of course you feel alone sometimes, especially when all your friends are getting married around you,” she told the Associated Press women’s editor. “But if you want a husband, you’ll get him—and a far better one at that—if you make it a secondary aim.”

What kind of reaction to the book had she been getting so far?

Funny they should ask. Just a couple of weeks before, Helen’s mother had sent her a furious letter, after reading a galley of Sex and the Single Girl. Scandalized by the subject matter, Cleo went so far as to urge Helen to stop publication altogether. Perhaps the book would be a sensation and stir up a lot of publicity, Cleo wrote: “So do murder and rape!”

Knowing a good hook, Helen trotted out the anecdote about her mother’s angry response, furnishing one reporter’s lead: “When Mrs. Cleo Bryan, 69, of Osage, Ark., picked up an advance copy of her daughter’s first book, she was understandably proud,” Art Berman wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “By the time she put the book down her pride had turned to horror.”

Cleo, Helen’s mother. (Family photograph courtesy of Norma Lou Honderich.)

Helen didn’t mention that she thought her mother was being totally selfish, that all Cleo cared about was what a handful of busybodies were gossiping about in the Ladies’ Aid Circle in Osage. Cleo’s letter had in fact brought her to tears. (She’d read it while sunning on the roof of her house—somehow, more than fifteen hundred miles away, Cleo could still bring her down.) She simply suggested that her book was meant for a hipper crowd. “My mother is quite a dame,” Helen told the Times, “but her day was different.”

And what exactly did her husband make of it all?

“David put me up to writing the book, so to speak,” Helen told the Times, launching into their story of how he discovered copies of old letters she had written to other men. The subtext was key: Not only had he approved of Sex and the Single Girl, he had conceived of the idea and assigned it to her in the first place.

The day of her photo shoot for the Times, Helen put on a delicate sleeveless print dress cinched at the waist, round earrings, and what appears to be a glossy wig. Sitting on a sofa, she stroked the silky fur of her Siamese cat, Samantha, with one hand. In the other she held a single piece of paper several feet away from her face, so as not to obscure it—after all, a lot of effort had gone into those carefully drawn cat eyes and perfectly painted lips. In fact, she looked more like an actress reading for a role than a writer in the midst of her creative process, but she was going for glamour as she stared past the paper and typewriter placed in front of her, and somewhere into the middle distance.

As staged as it was, her pose was still better than the one that David, dressed in a jacket, starched shirt, and French cuffs, was experimenting with behind her. Leaning his elbows against the back cushion, he nestled his chin into his knuckles, framing his face like a heart, and pretended to read the page along with his wife.

POP! The scene was captured, and on the morning of Sunday, June 24, 1962, it ran in the Los Angeles Times. It was the perfect image, and it captured everything that the Browns and Bernard Geis Associates had worked so hard to engineer. Helen Gurley Brown was her own woman, with her own career, but she had her own man, too—not to mention a new book in the works. The article mirrored the image: Clearly Helen had found the right person in David, and he had found the right person in her. They were the picture of a new kind of couple, a husband and wife who were in business as well as in bed together, a team—that was the real message of the article, affixed with the headline “HUSBAND SAID ‘WRITE.’ Helen’s Book Was a Shock to Her Mother.”

As word of mouth spread, Helen Gurley Brown became the topic du jour in offices and college dormitories, subways and living rooms, from the beaches of the Hamptons to the poolside lounges of Palm Springs.

In Los Angeles, bookstores couldn’t hold on to their copies. For five weeks, Pickwick’s in Hollywood devoted a window display entirely to copies of Sex and the Single Girl, opened to the more provocative chapters like “How to Be Sexy,” and paired with a black bikini that the store owner had borrowed from a boutique across the street.

In Greenwich Village, hipsters mocked Mrs. Brown and her ludicrous guide for single girls over thirty. “There are no girls that age down here—only boys,” a twenty-five-year-old Bronx-born reporter named Stephanie Gervis (later Harrington) wrote in the Village Voice, providing her own manhunting guide for readers. “Poets, writers, sculptors, and painters (unless they have galleries on Bleecker Street) are strictly for aesthetic nourishment and, of course, sex. Electricians are good for installing the hi fi set the stockbroker buys for you. . . . Radicals are good for nothing—they’re always off making speeches.” Folksingers could be found at the Café Wha? and the Bitter End, she added: “Be sure you arrive early, get a seat near the stage, and prostrate yourself at your idol’s feet. Gaze at him adoringly.”

Helen made an easy target, but spoofs and digs only carried the message further. People were talking about the book, and buying it, and that was what mattered. The religious bans that Letty and Helen were hoping for never happened—to their surprise, Helen was actually invited to speak at a Junior Catholic Woman’s Club, whose single-girl members saw her book as their new bible. Meanwhile, newspapers published letters from incensed readers who shared the outrage Cleo had expressed to her daughter weeks before.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, one indignant man called Helen Gurley Brown’s messaging in Sex and the Single Girl “a libel against womanhood” that threatened the chastity of the nation’s girls. “The breaking down of moral values . . . which this book indirectly advocates is leading Western civilization into a decline,” he sputtered.

In the Los Angeles Times, book critic Robert Kirsch seemed personally offended by Sex and the Single Girl. “Miss Brown provides the blueprint of a female so phony that the man who cannot see through the mask and affectation deserves his fate,” Kirsch spat. “Indeed, everything is a front. . . . She rushes breathlessly from punchy paragraph to compressed exposure, a creature of the advertising age, endorsing the phoniness and hard-soft-subliminal sell which substitutes for individuality, candor, sincerity. What she describes as sex is not sex at all but a kind of utility. Perhaps futility would be a better word.”

Other critics agreed: Helen Gurley Brown was about as deep as a pillbox hat. But she also had her defenders. “At long last someone has written a book that says being single can be fun. Not only can be, but is fun—once unmarried ladies shake themselves free of the propaganda of wives’ magazines,” wrote Anne Steinert in the New York Journal-American. In the San Francisco Examiner, Mildred Schroeder predicted that the author’s “sometimes shocking but always stimulating philosophy” would make Sex and the Single Girl “the most controversial topic on the cocktail circuit since Kinsey” and recommended it to every woman “over the age of consent,” while the Houston Chronicle claimed it was as “racy and sassy” as its title suggested, but also full of “hard common sense.” “Oh, you’ll blush at a few of the paragraphs and ask yourself, ‘Do I dare go on?’” wrote one reviewer in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette, before urging her readers to get past their embarrassment. “You’ll bless her for her open frankness. . . . Honestly, you’ll probably want to go out and try her ‘secret formulas for success.’”

Just as the Browns had hoped, Sex and the Single Girl was a smash and Helen soon became a sensation. Reporters relished the chance to tell the tale of the poor little girl from Arkansas who made it big. Hers was a Horatio Alger story, and no one told it as vividly—or as frequently—as Helen herself.

Back at her typewriter, Helen fed in another sheet of onionskin. “Brief Resume of What’s Happened With the Book So Far,” she typed at the top of the page, recapping her accomplishments through the month of June: Sex and the Single Girl would soon be on the New York Times bestseller list, having sold fifty thousand copies within a few weeks, and there was already a deal pending with Warner Bros., as well as talk of a Broadway show.

At the bottom of the page, she added a few more thoughts, her fingers tripping over the keys as she typed up her pitch for an article about the making of a bestseller—her own, of course. She imagined a picture story, illustrating her whirlwind tour through various autographing parties and TV appearances, all happening as she tried to hold on to her clients and her job at the ad agency. There would be a personal element as well. Thanks to her success with the book, David was benefiting in his career, too.

“David Brown in for new scrutiny at 20th Fox because described by me so often publicly and in print as brainy, charming and sexy,” she pecked away.

Helen never got the allure of electric typewriters—the humming motor reminded her of a meter, measuring the minutes, as if to say, “Now it’s time to get down to work.” She didn’t need a reminder. She was always working. She preferred her old-fashioned Royal 440 manual typewriter, a souvenir from her secretarial days. It was a different kind of reminder—a reminder of how far she had come.